Name: Hedwich Kuipers PhD
Affiliation: University of Calgary
Cumming School of Medicine
Dept. of Clinical Neurosciences

Dr. Kuipers received her MSc in Biopharmaceutical Sciences and her PhD in Immunology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. After this, she moved to Stanford University to do neuroimmunology research in the lab of Dr. Lawrence Steinman and continued to study extracellular matrix immunology in the lab of Dr. Paul Bollyky. In April 2018 she joined the Department of Clinical Neurosciences of the University of Calgary as an Assistant Professor of Neuroimmunology.

Dr. Kuipers’s research centers on neuroinflammatory diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and tries to understand the interaction between immune cells entering the central nervous system (CNS) and its resident cells. Her main focus is on how astrocytes regulate inflammatory responses. She has shown before that these cells, which are highly abundant in the brain, can release factors that help immune cells infiltrate into CNS tissue. She currently investigates how astrocytes interact with these immune cells and shape their responses, using molecular and cell biology approaches, as well as in vivo models of MS.